Home / Archive / The Art of Letting Go
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Department: May 2007
The Art of Letting Go
How to lighten the burden of being the heavy
Story by Rich Ehisen
When it comes to firing someone these days, there are seemingly umpteen million rules and regulations that an employer must adhere to if he or she wishes to avoid a messy legal hassle afterward. But as anyone who has ever actually had to terminate an employee knows, the legal and procedural elements of the process are only part of the equation. Firing someone — even when they richly deserve to be shown the door — can also raise ethical conundrums that make an already tough decision that much harder.
No. 1 on that list is whether to can the employee in the first place. Most employers stubbornly resist removing a bad employee long past the need to do so becomes obvious.
“If you’ve invested in hiring somebody, everybody’s natural inclination is to hold onto that investment,” says Bob Pritchett, author of the book “Fire Someone Today,” a business guide for entrepreneurs. Pritchett, who is also the president and CEO of Logos Bible Software, a software company based in Bellingham, Wash., says that when it comes to dealing with the reality of an employee that isn’t working out, many employers and managers fall into the trap of simply not wanting to be the bad guy.
That is, in part, because the boss is so often depicted in popular culture as the epitome of greed and narcissism. Who, after all, does not recall Dustin Hoffman’s uncaring boss firing him for taking too much time off to deal with a custody battle over his young son in the 1979 Hollywood mega-hit “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Or Hoffman’s stunned response, a simple but damning “Shame on you.”
While a termination rarely results in losing custody of a child, getting fired — what Sacramento-based labor attorney Bob Rediger calls “industrial capital punishment” — is still almost always devastating to the employee involved. As such, fired workers often react with anger or tears, something no boss looks forward to dealing with.
“Keeping a bad employee is really selfish.”
— Bob Pritchett, author, “Fire Someone Today”
“Firing someone is difficult because most of the time, you really are not well-prepared for it,” Pritchett says. “Your mom taught you to get along in the world by being polite and saying nice things to people, even if you don’t like them. Those are great skills to have on the playground or in your social life, but they are not necessarily the best tools for managing people.” But Pritchett contends that failing to cut the cord with a bad employee is not only damaging to the company, it is also malicious and unethical.
“Keeping a bad employee isn’t helping that person at all,” he says. “In fact, it is really selfish on the boss’s part. He might want to be seen as a nice guy, or he may feel bad because it is too close to Christmas or some other excuse, but in reality, keeping somebody who needs to go is only holding them back from finding a career that’s going to work for them.”
Scott Hanson, a partner in Hanson McClain, a Sacramento-based financial services company, says keeping an underperforming employee also creates an unfair hardship on other workers who often must pick up that person’s slack.
“A company’s first obligation is to its employees, then to its customers, and only then to its owners,” Hanson says. “So when there is an employee that is not pulling his or her share, it is really unfair to the other people in the organization.”
Most employers and human resources experts agree that the key to properly managing the end of a bad employee fit actually begins before that decision is made, specifically by working to fix whatever shortcomings that person has long before it comes to the point of no return. At the least, Hanson says, a good employer should always make sure that person always knows where they stand with management.
“When we have an employee who isn’t getting the job done, I believe it is the company’s responsibility to work with that person to do everything we can to resolve the problem,” says Hanson. “For instance, maybe they’re having trouble getting to work on time because they have a childcare issue. If so, maybe we can work out a more flexible schedule.” In any case, Hanson says, “When a person is terminated, it should never come as a surprise.”
Nor should management ever forget that employees who remain on the job are always watching the events of a termination closely. Jack Gilbert, president of Del Mar-based New Page Consulting Inc. and the author of “Strengthening Ethical Wisdom,” a guide for corporate leaders, says firings and layoffs can send a powerful message — positive or negative — to the rest of the staff.
“Of course you’re afraid you’re going to put someone on the street.
But nine times out of 10, that’s not the case.”
— Scott Hanson, Hanson McClain
“All leadership conduct gives employees clues about what the organization considers important,” says Gilbert. “When it is clear an employee, especially a manager or above, is terminated for poor performance or a breach of the company’s values, it tells employees that those things matter to the organization. When employees are let go through no fault of their own, as in a layoff, how well those employees are treated in the termination process tells the rest of the organization how they would be treated in similar circumstances and how much employees are truly valued.”
In that regard, Revonda Kennedy, a human resources manager for a national telecommunications company with several offices in the Sacramento region, says: “We always strive to remember that, whether this person caused their own problem or not, this could be our own brother, sister or parent who is losing their livelihood. We owe it to them to treat them like a human being, not an object.”
But ethical considerations surrounding termination do not apply only to the considerations of the employee. Many managers, for instance, will immediately cut loose an employee who gives notice if that person is known to be leaving to go to work for a competitor.
Ken Klima, parts-department manager for Future Nissan in Roseville, experienced that situation firsthand early in his career when he was terminated just hours after revealing he was leaving for a management position with another company in the same market.
“I didn’t understand it at the time,” he says, “but I do now. If that person is leaving us for a competitor, what motivation does he have to stay loyal to our company, even if it is only for a few weeks? Even if this person had always been a good employee, he would naturally be looking to take our customers with him, and maybe even other personnel. In that case, I owe it to the person who pays my check to prevent any chance of that happening by removing that employee from the equation as soon as possible.”
And what of the worker with the excuse for his or her poor performance, a la Hoffman’s desperate-dad character? While it is good drama for Hollywood to make the boss the heavy, an underperforming employee is a burden to everyone, including customers.
“Of course you’re always afraid that you are going to put someone out on the street,” Hanson says. “But nine times out of 10, that’s not the case at all. This particular job or company is just not the right fit. If the employer holds up his end, odds are that down the road that person will find that fit somewhere else and the employer will realize that the termination was not only the right thing for the company, it was the right thing for the person as well.”
